I assume those numbers are for shootings only, right? I expect the British rates would be higher if they included people dying by suffocation or heart failure while being, um, over-enthusiastically apprehended...

Tangentially related, but I can only assume there's going to be the usual annual controversy-fest over Saint Nicholas' Eve tomorrow? I heard somewhere that a lot of places had decided to ban Zwarte Piet this year.

Zimmerman wrote that he was “proud to announce” that a portion of the proceeds raised would be used to “fight BLM [Black Lives Matter] violence against Law Enforcement officers” as well as ending the career of Angela Corey, his prosecutor – “and Hillary Clinton’s anti-firearm rhetoric”.

He signed off “your friend, George M. Zimmerman” and “Si vis pacem, para bellum” – the Latin adage, “If you want peace, prepare for war”.

Zimmerman was reportedly banned from Twitter in December but used the platform to voice similar views, including an apparent reference to Martin as a “moron”, a description of the BLM movement as “black slime matters” and a retweet of a post showing Martin’s lifeless body with the caption, “Z-man is a one-man army”.

Wow. This guy is really determined to prove that personal morality has no absolute zero, isn't he?

Felt inevitable that cops would be shot with all these incidents of police brutality, but certainly didn't expect a coordinated sniper attack.

Militarise your police force, arm your citizens and subject an entire race and class to persistent discrimination and often lethal force and you've got the recipe for a domestic war. Also the fact that the justice system is manifestly unjust, especially if you happen to be black, and it's not surprising that people feel violence is the best recourse.

The argument from pro-gun people that guns are needed for self-defence against the government has always seemed alien to me but from the POV of african-americans, I can kind of see the point of it. If your police force was racist, armed and willing to kill you just for the colour of your skin (without fear of legal reprisals), wouldn't YOU want a gun?

Scott Alexander had an interesting post a while back where he actually looks at some data surrounding racial disparities and police shootings:

A topical issue these days. Once again, the same dynamic at play. We know black people are affected disproportionately to their representation in the population, but is a result of police racism or disproportionate criminality?

Mother Jones magazine has an unexpectedly beautiful presentation of the data for us:

The fourth bar seems like what we’re looking for. You could go with the fifth bar, but then you’re just adding noise of who did or didn’t duck out of the way fast enough.

As you can see, a person shot at by a police officer is more than twice as likely to be black as the average member of the general population. But, crucially, they are less likely to be black than the average violent shooter or the average person who shoots at the police.

We assume that the reason an officer shoots a suspect is because that officer believes the suspect is about to shoot or attack the officer. So if the officer were perfectly unbiased, then the racial distribution of people shot by officers would look exactly like the distribution of dangerous attackers. If it’s blacker than the distribution of dangerous attackers, the police are misidentifying blacks as dangerous attackers.

But In fact, the people shot by police are less black than the people shooting police or the violent shooters police are presumably worried about. This provides very strong evidence that, at least in New York, the police are not disproportionately shooting black people and appear to be making a special effort to avoid it.

For some reason most of the studies I could get here were pretty old, but with that caveat, this is also the conclusion of Milton (1977) looking at police departments in general, and Fyfe (1978), who analyzes older New York City data and comes to the same conclusion. However, the same researcher analyzes police shootings in Memphis and finds that these do show clear evidence of anti-minority bias, sometimes up to a 6x greater risk for blacks even after adjusting for likely confounders. The big difference seems to be that NYC officers are trained to fire only to protect their own lives from armed and dangerous suspects, but Memphis officers are (were? the study looks at data from 1970) allowed to shoot property crime suspects attempting to flee. The latter seems a lot more problematic and probably allows more room for officer bias to get through.

[EDIT: A commenter pointed out to me that Tennessee vs. Garner banned this practice in the late 1980s, meaning Memphis’ shooting rate should be lower and possibly less biased now]

The same guy looks at the race of officers involved and finds that “the data do not clearly support the contention that white [officers] had little regard for the lives of minorities”. In fact, most studies find white officers are disproportionately more likely to shoot white suspects, and black officers disproportionately more likely to shoot black suspects. This makes sense since officers are often assigned to race-congruent neighborhoods, but sure screws up the relevant narrative.

Summary: New York City data suggests no bias of officers towards shooting black suspects compared with their representation among dangerous police encounters, and if anything the reverse effect. Data from Memphis in 1970 suggests a strong bias towards shooting black suspects, probably because they shoot fleeing suspects in addition to potentially dangerous suspects, but this practice has since stopped. Older national data skews more toward the New York City side with little evidence of racial bias, but I don’t know of any recent studies which have compared the race of shooting victims to the race of dangerous attackers on a national level. There is no support for the contention that white officers are more likely than officers of other races to shoot black suspects.

I think this is a rather disingenuous question. Yes, black men commit a disproportionate amount of street-level crime including gun crime but just to say "oh well of course cops therefore going be more likely to shoot them" doesn't come close to justifying how willing cops are to shoot unarmed black men when they're either involved in extremely trivial offences (e.g. Michael Brown) or doing nothing wrong at all (e.g. Philando Castile, by the sound of it - reaching for his licence after being pulled over for a broken taillight, FFS!).

But the question is how willing are the US police to shoot black men? That's a question about general trends, so it's not enough to simply look at a few specific cases: "In fact, most studies find white officers are disproportionately more likely to shoot white suspects, and black officers disproportionately more likely to shoot black suspects. This makes sense since officers are often assigned to race-congruent neighborhoods, but sure screws up the relevant narrative."

'Urban Guerilla' by Oppenheimer is an interesting read - basically details plans to prepare for widespread urban warfare against black and left groups in the wake of the Chicago riots and the rise of militancy in the mid-late 60's. This goes waaaayyy back.

'Urban Guerilla' by Oppenheimer is an interesting read - basically details plans to prepare for widespread urban warfare against black and left groups in the wake of the Chicago riots and the rise of militancy in the mid-late 60's. This goes waaaayyy back.

Sure, but I'm talking about recent history, stuff I can remember actually hearing about in the news.